Best Of

Even if tonight is on the players rather than Dodds, when he came in we were 4 ahead of Wrexham in 2nd, we are now 3 behind, in the space of 10 games.

Dropped points against Crawley, failing to score against Shrewsbury and Wigan at home, as well as losing to your closest rivals. It's not gone well. That spell of games was where we needed to give ourselves a cushion ahead of a very tough last 7 fixtures, playing 6 of the top 10 (4 of them away).

Just feels like we have lost all momentum.

Weirdly I feel a lot more positive after tonight’s result than I did after the Lincoln one.

Personally I thought the Kone header over the bar in the first half was THE miss of the game but if we did have a miss of the season competition then we wouldn’t have to look too far beyond a replay of the game to fill out the nominees.

I'm as frustrated as anyone after tonight and can't see us getting promoted (we're drawing too many games imo), but I'm not sure Dodds' formation has anything to do with tonight's result. If our players had put their shooting boots on we'd have been 2/3-0 up at half time.

To those saying that he's made a mistake in changing a winning formula - that formula wasn't winning. The wide players (Fred in particular) had gone massively off the boil and we'd stopped having any threat at all. We'd also lost the likes of Harvie.

I agreed with many posters that the Lincoln game was fairly tedious (though we won!) but I don't think our failure to win tonight can be put on the manager. Kone, for a start, should fairly easily have had a hat trick tonight.

Interview is up.

Lots of face touching and the key word is actually.

I'm going to jump the shark here and say Dodds is out of his depth and we are fucked (for now, as promotion was expected in 2028)

Happy to be proved wrong.

I’m still salty that I got multiple downvotes for saying that I saw him in a leg/knee brace and crutches in Marlow a few weeks ago. Hasn’t been seen since. I fear his season could be over.

This is a mad take for so many reasons. The only things I agree with are your points about the subs (which killed our momentum) and Wrexham being a poor team.

With regards to the other stuff:

1. Imagine the fume on here and at AP if Dodds took off the league's top scorer at 0-0 v bottom of the table? He had a very poor night in front of goal, but you'd back him to score at least one. He's more dangerous than anyone who could have come on for him

2. Our passing and movement today was actually very good. Hence the bucket load of chances.

3. There's no chance we fail to make the playoffs. We're 13 points clear of 7th with 6 games to play for most teams. Even if we lost every game from now we'd still probably make them on 75 points. Oxford went up with 76 last year.

4. I distinctly remember everyone on here moaning about our performance at Wrexham, which was seen as weak and uninspiring.

5. Sunderland fans' opinions on Dodds are barely relevant. He was an interim there and he's never had a chance as head coach. He at least needs some time to prove himself. Bloomfield got more than plenty.

6. Shrewsbury clearly lacked quality and are an awful team, but tbf to them, they put in a heroic defensive shift tonight. I've seen far worse teams at AP. Forest Green 2017 springs to mind. Crewe in 2016. Bolton in 2019. Burton in 2022. Almost every game v Bristol Rovers over the last few years.

How is saying that the manager may have had some influence on the outcome of a football match a pile on?! I said our general performance was good and that Kone was poor, and I’m not attacking or blaming Dodds. It hardly seems controversial to suggest that something different could feasibly have been done to score more than nil. But if your position is that there was absolutely nothing the manager could have done differently to win that match then fair enough.

Yet again, another night on the Gasroom when I'm glad we did not lose.

Launderettes report a boom in business as a backlog of urinated sheets pile up on Wednesday morning

The team wasn't really playing well, the wide players weren't playing well. The squad is really set up for wingbacks. Not changing something was worse than trying it.

I'm sure he didn't want to change. But he really had to. Now he needs to refine the formation.

Ploughing on with Fred, or Mcleary wide was madness. Lubala and Udoh, and Kobe have all been injured. Leaving very little wide options.

The formation was fine tonight, the players players, well mainly Kone, were not.